Rock, Paper, Shotgun - The Slow, Strange Death Of The Demo.The other side of the coin is making the increasing rareness of a demo a promotional event in itself Ė the Duke Nukem Forever demo got its own announcement video, and will for a while be made exclusive to people who bought specific editions of Borderlands. Itís not about promoting the game, about letting people establish whether or not theyíre interested in the game, but instead itís treated as a reward to be fought and paid for, a product in itself: the polar opposite of the traditional demo. I donít like having to beg to be marketed at. See also: Facebook Likes unlocking screenshots. Promotion becomes the reward, one we plead for rather than one we choose to assess.

Ars Technica - The death march: the problem of crunch time in game development.It's also important to remember that not all employees in the game industry are working on projects they are passionate about. It's pretty hard to imagine the entire staff behind the latest Dora the Explorer game being gung-ho about their work every day. Even those who are lucky enough to work on amazing AAA projects often aren't creatively stimulated. If you're the guy who makes different brick textures for the buildings in GTA4, or the guy who programs the way fire behaves when it spreads to different substances, that's not the same as being a top-level designer.

Ars Technica - Modern Warfare 3 vs. Battlefield 3: the difference is in the PC.That's the other reason Battlefield 3 has my attention: I can see what the engine is doing. The environments will feature massive destruction, and the animation of the soldiers is almost uncanny. It's immediately noticeable from a graphical perspective, and the physics updates will impact the game. Watching the Modern Warfare 3 presentation left me squinting as I tried to see what's new in the engine. Where are the big updates? We may see them later, but that's something you need to put front and center when you show a game for the first time.

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